When I first met Nicky, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had spoken to her countless times online and over the phone, but never had I dared to meet her in real life. I was living in Buffalo at the time, which was a good six or seven hour drive from where she still lived with her family. So when she had invited me to go to a Philadelphia Phantoms game with her and her friends, I was reluctant to accept the invitation.
Reluctant or not, I accepted, and spent St. Patrick’s Day in Pennsylvania, sleeping on the concrete floor of her basement bedroom after a night of minor league hockey (and an auction afterward). At the time I had no idea what this was the start of, but it was certainly the start of something.
It wasn’t until the last week in June of the same year, at the Central Park wedding of one of my best friends from high school and his first wife, that our relationship had been unofficially made official. Back then there was no Facebook, there was no real way of determining whether or not a relationship was official. And for either of us, being in an actual relationship was something new. We were both in new territory. I had never been attracted to another woman, and I’m sure that Nicky was the same way.
Nicky is the reason that I am now living in Pennsylvania, in a room in her parents’ basement. Five years ago, when Nicky needed to escape from her parents’ house, I opened my door and allowed her to move in with me and my parents in New York, but Nicky was uncomfortable with that. She was uncomfortable living in New York because she thought that everyone (especially my parents) had judged her without getting to know anything about her. Nicky likes to think that her outward appearance is “prickly” at best, and though she likes to say that she has agoraphobia I like to think that she just dislikes people. She says that everyone is quick to judge her when, in actuality, she is the one who is quick to judge. She is the one who is always quick to judge.
Right now, she’s at an IronPigs game. She’s sitting in the press box at Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, pretending to be the professional that she strives to be, but I know better. I know it’s just a facade, and that it won’t last. And I know, with the right grooming, it could last. But I don’t see Nicky as the type to put in the leg work to make that all happen. She wants everything handed to her, and everything that isn’t handed to her, well, she’s quite indifferent about. In fact, her indifference is one of the things that truly irritates me.
But that’s another story for another day.
The Pennsylvania Stranger 